WATT O’HUGH UNDERGROUND BEING THE SECOND PART OF THE STRANGE AND ASTOUNDING MEMOIRS OF WATT O’HUGH the THIRD
By Steven S. Drachman
Copyright © 2014 by Steven S. Drachman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. ISBN 987-0-9913274-1-6 Front cover illustration and book design by Mark Matcho Chickadee Prince Logo by Garrett Gilchrist
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PROLOGUE In 1863, I was employed as a clerk for the City, still a young man, fresh-faced, relatively enthusiastic about my life of respectability and about my regular pay, which required no thievery and thus no risk of arrest. Every morning I put on a tie, dampened my hair and pushed a brush through it. Then I clambered down the stairs, out the door and into the awakening dawn, sometimes whistling (sometimes not). This was before the Federal government proclaimed the draft in Manhattan. The War was creeping across the country, unseen but greatly felt, and those of us lucky enough to be happy to be alive were all just hovering over the edge of the abyss. Life was delicious, like a drop of honeysuckle nectar, and perhaps nearly as briefly enjoyed. I was young and still alive, and I was also in love. I was in love more than I knew. And so I was bittersweetly, desperately and ominously happy. As a clerk, I sat behind a rough, splintery little wooden desk in a large central room on the second floor of a sturdy, solid City government building, where I added up numbers and wrote things down. Though I had been at this job for more than a year, I still didn’t really know what I was accomplishing and for whom, nor why anyone thought it necessary to pay me to add up numbers and to write things down, but I was nevertheless grateful to have a job. Periodically, the administrative supervisor would leave his office and wander among the clerk’s desks, peer over our shoulders, bark at us, or, on wonderful rare occasions, praise us. He was a bald man, a little overweight, with a big round face that would grow red and ripe with pride when he was pleased with one of his clerks and red and ripe with disappointment when he was angry. Today, writing these words, seventy-three years later, I cannot remember his name, though even to this day I consider him my unofficial adoptive father, the first man who ever believed in me at all, even if it was only a little bit, and only from time to time. On May 13, 1863, when the working day ended, I said good evening to my boss, and, upon exiting to the street, I walked Northwest a number of blocks, then hopped onto the omnibus, which shuttled me uptown to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where heavenly Lucy Billings awaited me in the plush lobby. “’Evening, handsome,” she whispered in my ear. (I was tall and young, I had the strength of the streets, and I possessed a handsomeness that grew naturally from youth and vigor, back then, as Lucy correctly noted. This is not braggadocio. I am not handsome now; I was handsome then. And though I’d purchased my suit at one of the low-price working-man shops downtown, my tie was particularly nice that day, and so I looked the man I yearned to become, a man who belonged here, meeting the heavenly Lucy Billings in the Fifth Avenue Hotel lobby, rather than the person I knew that I really was, an orphan who’d grown up in the marshy and dark slum streets of south Manhattan.) I was born in 1842, and so at the time I was only 20, and she was a bit ambiguously older than I. Not too much older, I supposed then, but just experienced enough to teach me a lesson or two on a number of subjects. Such as: how to impress New York society big bugs with just the right turn of phrase in just the right slightly-unidentifiable accent; how to dance the German at a society ball at a respectable address on the Fifth Avenue; the proper way to stab my fork into a
bloody-red steak in the starched white stuffiness of Delmonico’s stifling-cavernous dining room; how to applaud graciously from the good seats in the Grand Opera House. She taught me about a couple of other subjects, I recall, such as abolitionism, suffragism, the free love movement, economic egalitarianism, political subversion and the overthrow of the codfish aristocracy class, matters that she shared only with certain carefully screened coconspirators. (From this philosophical grab bag, I had my personal favorite, as you may have guessed.) Back then I was young as the dew on a daisy, and I was excited to learn such things, especially if I were to learn from Lucy Billings, whom I loved then, and whom I love still, separated from her even, as I am, by decades. Lucy was an American girl from common blood, I thought, but she claimed to be an heiress from the old country, and at society events, she tried to pass me off as her brother. But I wasn’t her brother, and I was glad of it. A wave of nattily waxed, tail-coated and top-hatted moustaches sauntered by, knocking us to and fro, amidst the Hotel’s buzzing carpeted elegance. She slipped her arm in mine, the crooks of our elbows cohabited cozily, and we exited the Hotel together. I cannot remember much of the ensuing early evening, although I suppose that we dined someplace Lucy would have considered appropriately classy, and that Lucy slipped me some cash under the table with which to pay the bill. What I do remember, however, is that either Lucy or I had a reckless and romantic brainstorm for an end to the evening, and that near-midnight I found myself drunk in a rowboat in the North River just off the Manhattan Island shore, playing the ukulele tolerably well, singing a popular song of that particular decade (less tolerably well), and watching Lucy laugh, with deep affection in her deep blue eyes. She ran one gloved hand through her blond hair, which caught the moonlight. The rowboat cut through the black and murky waters without much urgency. Lucy was smooth as an ivory statue and soft as a velvet pillow, she had a slender waist, the kind heart of an angel, plump red lips, she wore a scarf of feathers about her neck, and I was twenty. We splashed further into the dark distance, until the palace car that had drawn us down the Third Avenue was naught but a blurry fluttering line of light, and the oyster stores that abutted the wharf we’d just left no longer stank like a dead polecat. As we drifted from the Island, my gaze roamed, as always, to the dark swamp of my old childhood orphan home, which consumed the vitality of the metropolis like a great black hole. A mile to the north of the ghetto, like a castle on a hill, the lights of Broadway shined and taunted, a golden fairyland of joy just out of reach beyond the slum apartments. To the West, I could see the lighthouse in the Staten Island sound, flickering in the near distance, and beyond that, the country mansions on the Staten Island resort itself, behind the heavy guns that lined its shore. Canal boats and steam ships raced along through the starry water, and the all-night gas-lit ferries, ringed by colored lamps, seemed to set the river aflame. Manhattan Island was a Christmas tree with pretty ornaments, swinging in the wind, harmless and lovely (a few of them, admittedly, broken beyond repair). My little boat bobbed on eddies and swirls as the ships passed, and Lucy smiled in the darkness. At length I touched on a little island not a half mile across the Upper Bay, hopped into the gently lapping surf, pulled the boat up onto the narrow rocky coastline, took one of Lucy’s white-
gloved hands in mine and helped her ashore. It was just a towhead, really, with a few trees casting a romantic shadow, a towhead that wanted to be an island but which would never appear on any map, and which has since been washed away by the tides and no longer exists. Even as I write these words, its proud trees are long-ago driftwood. But back then it existed, and it seemed as permanent as the mansions and wide sidewalks of the Fifth Avenue, the racetrack at Jerome Park, the slums of the Five Points. Lying on the shore of the towhead and staring up at the stars that lit the Bay, Lucy said, “I imagine you and I are staring at exactly the same star, right now,” and I said that the one I was focused on was somewhat round and shiny and pretty, and she laughed, and she said she imagined that there was a planet rotating around that very star, with a young man and a somewhat young but somewhat older woman staring right down at us, thinking the very same thoughts that she and I were thinking at that very moment and saying the very same things. “What do you think will happen to that young man and that somewhat young woman?” she wondered, and I took a guess, and then she took a guess, and I admit that her guess was a little bit more romantic and beautiful, but I did my best, and I suppose that she appreciated it. I will spare you a precise recounting of our poetical sentiments, because I am pressing my luck already, but in begging your indulgence, I ask you to recall the first few months of your finest love affair, and the silly words you said, and the momentous emotions you felt. Quiet waves tickled the shore, and the high branches of an island oak rustled in the wind, which we liked. But then came a discordant noise in the woods, which distracted us both, put a chill in the air, seemed to melt into the vapor, and made Lucy’s breath catch in her throat. I tried to shrug it away, back then, seventy years ago, and why not? I had other things on my mind. I wrapped my coat around Lucy, and I caressed one rosy cheek. But now I wish that I had paid some bit of attention to that noise in the woods, and that I had listened to the words ringing in my ears. Because that noise in the woods was none-other-than my older self – wiser, sadder, and more than a little translucent and fuzzy around the edges, who had traveled back through the decades to a moment in the past when my lustrous Lucy Billings might just have chosen to marry me, had I only asked, and thus changed all that was to come. The gray-haired Watt O’Hugh was roaming Time, drifting with the ancient, ceaseless wind as it wound through the millennia wreaking its havoc. My older self whispered in my own, younger, foolisher ear, like a ghost: “Marry me, Lucy.” Imploring my younger self, and nearly invisible in the night: “Just ask her. Now. Just ask her now. “Save us both.”
STEVEN S. DRACHMAN WATT O’HUGH UNDERGROUND Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third STEVEN S. DRACHMAN is a restaurateur, writer and critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice and The Chicago Sun-Times. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters. This is his second novel.